Devin Finzer (born 1990) is an American entrepreneur and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of

OpenSea OpenSea is an American online non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace headquartered in New York City. The company was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in 2017. OpenSea offers a marketplace allowing for non-fungible tokens to be sold directly ...

, a marketplace for

non-fungible tokens A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the b ...

. In January 2022, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

'' estimated the stakes in OpenSea owned by Finzer and his co-founder Alex Atallah to be worth $2.2 billion each, making them the first two non-fungible token billionaires.

Early life and education

Devin Finzer was born in 1990; his mother is a physician while his father works as a

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

. Finzer grew up in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area G ...

and attended

Miramonte High School Miramonte High School is a public high school located in Orinda, California, United States. It is part of the Acalanes Union High School District. The school has a college-preparatory program, with 15 Advanced Placement courses offered. Hist ...

Orinda, California Orinda is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city's population as of the 2020 census is estimated at 19,514 residents. History Orinda is located within four Mexican land grants: Rancho Laguna de los Palos Colorados ...

. Finzer matriculated at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

, where he earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Mathematics in 2013. In his junior year at Brown, Finzer worked with future Figma founder Dylan Field to create CourseKick, a socially-oriented search engine for university course registration. Just two weeks after the site launched, 20% of undergraduates had registered. While at Brown, Finzer interned at

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongsi ...

, and

Flipboard Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Bejiing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates conten ...

. After graduating, he took a job at

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

as a software engineer.

Career

Finzer co-founded two tech start-ups, including Claimdog, a personal finance app acquired by

Credit Karma Credit Karma is an American multinational personal finance company founded in 2007, which has been a brand of Intuit since December 2020. It is best known as a free credit and financial management platform, but its features also include monitor ...

for an undisclosed amount. At Credit Karma, Finzer became interested in

blockchain technology A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a ...

. With Alex Atallah, Finzer developed and pitched WifiCoin, which would offer tokens in exchange for sharing access to a

wireless router A wireless router is a device that performs the functions of a router and also includes the functions of a wireless access point. It is used to provide access to the Internet or a private computer network. Depending on the manufacturer and mode ...

. The pair pitched the concept to

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

and were accepted. Inspired by the release of

CryptoKitties ''CryptoKitties'' is a blockchain game on Ethereum developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs, a company spun-off from Axiom Zen, that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats. It is one of the earliest attempts to deploy bloc ...

, the pair pivoted to the

non-fungible token A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the b ...

market, founding OpenSea in December 2017. After a 2018 pre-seed round by Y Combinator, OpenSea raised $2.1 million in venture capital in November 2019. In March 2021, the company raised $23 million in venture capital; four months later the company announced another investment round of $100 million making it a

unicorn The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead. In European literature and art, the unicorn has for the last thousand years o ...

. In January 2022, OpenSea raised $300 million in new series C funding, propelling the company's valuation to $13.3 billion. In July 2021, Finzer was listed 19th on ''Forbes'' "NFTy 50" list of most influential individuals in the

scene.

References

Living people 1990 births American billionaires Brown University alumni American technology company founders {{DEFAULTSORT:Finzer, Devin American chief executives